The Dish

Josh Shahryar fisks a Daily Telegraph piece by Will Heaven. It begins:

As young men and women took to the streets of Tehran on Sunday to confront the Revolutionary Guard, another very different protest sprang to life all over the world. This one didn’t face tear-gas or gunfire. And its participants didn’t risk prison, torture or death. It took place on 2009’s most trendy website: Twitter.com.

Well, now, how about the risk of having your family imprisoned, tortured or killed?

Did you know that dozens of social media activists have families in Iran and dozens more have received e-mails from the Iranian government telling them to stop or else their families would face serious harm? Did you know that Fereshteh Ghazi (@iranbaan), another activist who writes about prisoners, has family in Iran? Did you know that Isa Saharkhiz, the father of the most active of the Twitterati, Mehdi Saharkhiz (@onlymehdi), is in prison and being tried in connection with the protests?

Scott Lucas adds that persiankiwi, the indispensable tweeter of the June protests, was also arrested.

A reader writes:

I don't get your Undiebomber-related firing campaign.  It seems short-sighted.  Why are you baying for the blood of some random person when, as you say, this case was a system-wide failure?  So you admit that no one person did anything specifically wrong.  Isn't it a much more useful tool to get these people fanning out, searching their network for solutions rather than diving into the nearest foxhole for a few months?  I don't want anyone fired over this, I want people invested in improving the system. 

I don't see how this is accomplished by knocking off a few department heads and then installing new, inexperienced people in their place, people who will need to climb a learning curve and reshuffle the working structure.  I don't get how firing the very people who now have a VERY strong investment in bug-fixing these problems will help.  This happened because agencies were too busy protecting their own turf to see the bigger picture, and your response is to bring that to the micro level, threatening individuals with firing and ensuring that they WON'T extend themselves to find a fix.  Who the hell takes it upon themselves to try and fix the system, if the next time the system breaks, they get burnt alive?  How on earth is this remotely effective?

I do not favor firing some random person. I favor firing those who failed to see the clear data in front of them and take appropriate action. Blaming the system if it fails while exonerating those who enabled and didn't challenge the system even when something this obvious, this well-flagged and this dangerous comes on the radar is a cop-out.

I just watched Wolf Blitzer’s interview with Giuliani where he committed journalism, actually demanding that Giuliani relate his rhetoric to reality. I don’t have the transcript but Giuliani dismissed the anthrax attacks after 9/11 as a major domestic terror attack, because he didn’t have proof that they were the work of Islamists. When Blitzer – yes! – brought up the Richard Reid case, Giuliani punted and refused to criticize Bush for the same thing he criticized Obama for. Blitzer’s one failure was to press for a specific criticism of Bush’s decision in that case. But otherwise … much better. But what I really take from Rudy’s remarks is that he believes that merely saying “war on Islamist terrorism” again and again somehow helps us win. What most sentient beings have learned these past several years is that taking this war to a constant and grand rhetorical level empowers Jihadists more than it weakens them. There is a sick syndrome in which “conservatives” get into some dysfunctional relationship with Islamists with each faction elevating the other in global consciousness.

Obama is trying to wind down this drama and focus on actually finding and killing terrorists, removing their recruitments tools (like torture and Gitmo), and defusing their appeal to the Muslim middle. I will further note that Giuliani, in his criticism that Obama has not treated this like a war, has failed to mention the huge build-up of forces in Afghanistan. I remain deeply ambivalent about this strategy, but surely Giuliani would approve. It’s many more troops and many more resources than Bush ever devoted to Afghanistan. And yet all Giuliani believed showed Obama’s concern with terrorism was his use of the word “war” yesterday.

This is not a serious policy. It is not a serious politics.

John Robertson passes along this disturbing graph showing the young working less:

The big change appears to be that those in school have become increasingly less attached to the labor market. The percentage of school enrollees aged between 16 and 24 who are also participating in the labor market was relatively stable between 1989 and 1998 at around 51 percent. However, labor market participation by those in school declined between 1999 and 2008 from 50 percent to 42 percent. In contrast, labor force participation by those aged between 16 and 24 not enrolled in school has declined only modestly—from 82 percent to 80 percent between 1989 and 2008.

Free Exchange follows up.

Ouch:

Lieberman's overall approval rating is only 25%, with 67% disapproval. Democrats disapprove of him by 14%-81%, Republicans by 39%-48%, and independents by 32%-61%. Only 19% approve of his actions on the health care bill, with Democrats at 8%-80%, Republicans at 26%-55%, and independents at 30%-59%. Among those who support the bill, 84% disapprove of his handling of the issue, and in addition 52% of the people who don't support the bill also disapprove of Lieberman's actions.

Well, look at the poster he used for his college "War On Terror" week. Almost all of it is about torture and Gitmo. The Jihadists that Cheney unwittingly rallied and recruited against this country are legion.

Friedersdorf has a long, dead-on and devastating piece on Glenn Reynolds. A taste:

Instapundit punts on the substance of so many matters, choosing instead to make the pithiest point that jives with his readers’ sensibilities. There’s a climate change conference? Well is it cold there? Did anyone fly there on a private plane? Did any MSM reporter betray bias in their writeup? There’s your Instapundit climate change coverage for the day. Single instances of this behavior aren’t egregious, but the aggregate effect is to set daily Instapundit readers adrift in a constant stream of straw men and irrelevant points cheaply scored, losing site of the issue for the pith.

But this is the real meat:

Every time I’ve done an “Instapundit sanity test,” where I show one of these kerfuffles he’s occasionally engaged in to apolitical friends clueless about the blogosphere, they’re sympathetic to the person accused of having misunderstood him. “Wait, he’s against torture? Well don’t just show me this ‘heh’ post that set off the kerfuffle, show me the post where he makes the best case against torture. Oh, you can’t ever recall having read one like that?” These people tend to naively presume that political arguments are grounded in beliefs about specific issues, rather than the belief that one side is right overall, and therefore it is fun and loyal and savvy and righteous and pithy to zing the other side, ideally acting as though the zing is rooted in some greater symbolic import, or is another data point revealing the way things are, instead of being, say, a transient, irrelevant example of hypocrisy by the least defensible guy on the other side.

A reader writes:

Last night I had a dream in which you and I wandered a city-scape with a baby elephant.  It would be mauled by a stray hippopotamus. The night ended in the green room of Michelle Malkin's radio show. 

A reader nails it:

Peggy Noonan's biggest problem is that she's not a Republican anymore but she doesn't want to admit it. Like you, Bruce Bartlett, Chris Buckley and myself, she's a conservative – but unlike "us" she is unwilling to completely disengage from the party itself and recognize that it no longer represents true conservative values.  But she's too smart to simply regurgitate GOP talking points, so she ends up talking herself into circles. 

I think that's about right. But she does at least acknowledge the GOP's bankruptcy and extremism. Which is something,